Lacing Up the Gloves: Women, Boxing and Modernity

This article explores women's early twentieth-century engagement with boxing as a means of expressing the fragmentations and contradictions of modern life. Equally drawn to and repelled by the visceral agonism of the sport, female artists and writers of the First World War and post-war era appropriated the boxer's virile body in written and visual autobiographies, effectively breaching male territory and anticipating contemporary notions of female autonomy and self-realization. Whether by reversing the gaze of desire as a ringside spectator or inhabiting the physical sublime of boxing itself, artists such as Djuna Barnes, Vicki Baum, Mina Loy and Clara Bow enlisted the tropes, metaphors and physicality of boxing to fashion a new understanding of their evolving status and identity within a changing social milieu. At the same time, their corporeal and textual self-inscriptions were used to stage their own exclusion from the sport and the realm of male agency and power. Ultimately, while modernist women employ boxing to signal a radical break with the past, or a reinvention of self, they also use it to stage the violence and trauma of the era, aware of limits and vulnerabilities

Emily Johansen. Beyond Safety: Risk, Cosmopolitanism, and Contemporary Neoliberal Life. Bloomsbury, 2021.

Review of Emily Johansen. Beyond Safety: Risk, Cosmopolitanism, and Contemporary Neoliberal Life. Bloomsbury, 2021. xiii + 171 pp

Review of \u3ci\u3eF. P. Grove in Europe and Canada: Translated Lives\u3c/i\u3e By Klaus Martens

Canada\u27s leading prairie author Frederick Philip Grove (1879-1948) had a predilection for strong and silent heroes: the unforgettable Niels Lindstedt in Settlers of the Marsh (1925), Abe Spalding in Fruits of the Earth (1933), John Elliot in Our Daily Bread (1928). Grove\u27s fictional landscape was a multicultural potpourri of immigrants from Sweden, Iceland, Germany, and Russia with new-world men and women transforming the prairie wilderness into fertile and flourishing settlements. Yet Grove, aka German author and translator Felix Paul Greve, was also a literary con man who led his audience down the garden path in a fictionalized autobiography, In Search of Myself (1946), a story that produced literary furor in 1973 when Douglas O. Spettigue published the first biography of this enigmatic writer. In this richly detailed new biography, Klaus Martens explores Grove\u27s German origins with meticulous detective work; he situates the author within Europe\u27s turn-of-the-century culture of translation, before following Grove to the United States and then to Canada. The tale is riveting, with numerous peaks and highlights. The reader is intrigued to learn of Grove\u27s life in Sparta, Kentucky, in 1911, where the young author-immigrant was likely working as a teacher and trying his hand at tobacco farming, a somewhat quixotic enterprise for Grove, a fastidious and cerebral man with a lifelong love of stunningly elegant clothing but who also loved to pose as swarthy hobo, farm worker, and tree pruner in A Search for America (1927). Severe floods along the Eagle Creek spoiled the crop in Sparta in 1911, forcing farmers to take out heavy loans and mortgages or leading them to abandon farming altogether. No doubt Grove\u27s profound sympathy for the western farmer was born here. Not only is this biography meticulously researched, it is fun to read, as Martens explores Grove\u27s life and work with sympathy and irony. Fascinating too is Grove\u27s life with Elsa Ploetz, today better known as the New York Dada artist Baroness Elsa. A rich selection of illustrations and photographs of Grove and his world in Europe and in America further enhances the reader\u27s enjoyment and appreciation of this new biography. Martens has given us an important resource that ultimately opens up a new window on the life and works of Canada\u27s leading prairie pioneer author

Art, mode et modernisme : de la performance du corps de l’artiste à la construction de sujets hétérodoxes

Au tournant du XXe siècle, même à Greenwich Village, alors l’épicentre de l’expérimentation moderniste en Amérique du Nord, personne n’avait encore jamais rencontré une femme comme la baronne Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927). En 1910, dès son arrivée en provenance de Berlin, l’exilée allemande se fit arrêter pour avoir déambulé dans la 5e Avenue à Pittsburgh habillée en homme, fumant une cigarette. L’événement fit scandale et se retrouva à la une du New York Time sous le titre  : « Sh..

Two Odysseys of 'Americanization': Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Grove's A Search for America

Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Frederick Philip Grove's A Search for America are similar in their focus on the metaphor of America. Juxtaposing the two works gives insight into significant differences in Canadian and American conceptions of personal and national identity and valuations of the margins. Both protagonists, Dreiser's Clyde Griffiths and Grove's Phil Branden, suffer from their position as social outsiders and develop strategies to deal with their marginalization. The Canadian traveller distinguishes himself from his American counterpart through his self-conscious linguistic flexibility. Branden survives, not because he creates a name or well-defined identity for himself, but because he eludes the notion of a fixed identity in his journey towards self-creation. Griffiths's yearning to merge with the society that excludes him means that the only self he has is the one he will become; his language is emptied of meaning until he vanishes like a "nobody." In both novels, metaphors of self-creation are interwoven with metaphors of national identity. Dreiser's ironic tragedy dramatizes the ultimate expulsion of the scapegoat; Grove's ironic comedy-romance ends with the protagonist's overt reconciliation with North American society

Sexualizing power in naturalism: Theodore Dreiser and Frederick Philip Grove

This book sheds light on the function of female sexuality in a predominantly male genre: naturalist fiction. Gammel reveals that naturalism is frequently implicated in the very power structures it critiques. Reading European and North American naturalism through the lens of feminist and Foucaultian theories of power, Gammel argues that twentieth-century naturalism increasingly deconstructs itself in its depiction of sexuality, inevitably exposing the genre's internal ideological contradictions. The book makes a special contribution to Canadian studies.Ye